


Child's Play

by EternalEclipse



Category: Bleach
Genre: Angst, Canonical Character Death, Character Death, Gen, Groundhog Day, Kurosaki Ichigo-centric, Temporary Character Death, Time Loop, Time Travel, ichigo might be going insane, there is lots of sadness and death, this is not a happy fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-15
Updated: 2018-10-15
Packaged: 2019-08-02 18:07:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,932
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16310138
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EternalEclipse/pseuds/EternalEclipse
Summary: Ichigo didn't know how it had started, or how it would end. He hadn't even realized what was going on the first time. He hadn't had a clue what to do when Grand Fisher was killing his mother. And he didn't know what to do for a long time after, just that he wanted it all to stop.





	Child's Play

The first time, he hadn’t been quite aware of what was going on. He froze. He froze, and the hollow speared his mother’s body and then he froze for an entirely other reason.

He wasn’t sure he stopped screaming before the end, before the next time he woke up to his mother’s gentle admonishments, in his bedroom, and realized he had another chance.

\---

The next time was nearly as traumatizingly short. Ichigo saw Grand Fisher, and his instincts went haywire. He tried to reach for a zanpakuto he didn’t have, and his mom died anyway. There wasn’t anything he could do except cradle her body in his tiny arms that couldn’t hold her, probably couldn’t even hold his swords, until the end.

He wished it was an end.

\---

Some time later, he tried to run. They always walked home by the river, but what if they didn’t this time? Grand Fisher was enough of a hollow that someone would come to address him eventually, and even having a few shinigami under his belt wouldn’t mean much in Karakura between Urahara and Ishida Senior.

So he tried to get her to go home a different route, playing on his dimples and smiling harder than he’d ever done before.

They got home, and all he could feel was relief. Masaki patted his head and went to the kitchen to make dinner. Ichigo begged to help her, and she laughed at him as she always did, saying that she was fine even while making space for him to get a bit of the countertop to be in charge of.

And then they ran out of ingredients for the sauce, and Ichigo was to keep stirring as his mother went to the corner store to get a little bit more while they still could.

Ichigo couldn’t hear her scream with the physical distance between them, but his soul knew the moment she died, a sick kind of drumbeat that kicked up when it realized it only had one heart to play it. He didn’t remember screaming. He didn’t remember much at all, except his dad hugging him for once and his sisters being scared.

The next time, he promised himself, he’d figure out how to kill Grand Fisher. Nothing was worse than that look on Karin and Yuzu’s faces. Not even death.

\---

This time, Ichigo tried to stay late at the dojo. He convinced Tatsuki to spar with him after class, and their parents were fine with that, if a bit surprised. It had a twofold purpose in that he might be able to train himself just that little bit better, and he might be able to do _something_. He knew how Grand Fisher worked, was it so out there that he could work out a winning strategy?

He was hardly the best strategist they’d had on the team, but he’d been learning. Old Man Zangetsu wouldn’t have it any other way, after all. Endless scenarios, strategy games, with promises of lessons in other things once he succeeded. He’d never quite gotten to those, but it was usually worth it to see the Old Man be proud of him when he succeeded, in a way that he’d never felt about an adult other than his mother.

So he pulls for time, and hopes that it’s enough to start to teach him, even if it’ll take many iterations to get his nine-year-old body up to speed.

Of course it’s not enough this time. He’s just started. But he doesn’t give himself the luxury of looking away from the inevitable when it happens. The only thing he could say was that his mom never screamed, so he refused to this time.

\---

Then there were some cycles where he wasn’t so productive. He didn’t even make it out to the dojo this time. Not because he was trying a new way of avoiding it, he’d tried this one in the first couple of weeks as it was becoming clear that there was no avoiding a confrontation between Grand Fisher and Kurosaki Masaki that his mom wasn’t going to win, but because he just couldn’t make himself physically get out of bed.

 His mom had made him soup, thinking he was sick, and he forced that down. That much he could manage, just so she wouldn’t start worrying about him. The last thing he needed to do was cause her more trouble before she died.

He had to admit that he wasn’t getting anywhere anytime fast with learning to fight as a nine-year-old, especially given that he couldn’t develop any muscle tone. He only had a day to fix things, and there just wasn’t time.

He didn’t even know how this started, really. Had he actually died, and was the universe trying to make amends for that? Or was this just his own personal hell?

He still recognized the grief. He couldn’t think of his mom as being alive at this point, on this day he’d seen her die so many times. But it was a grief that had no healing outlet, since he physically couldn’t move on. And that may have hurt most of all.

That time, Masaki died later that night, taken by surprise when she was putting out the crash. There was barely a scream, and Ichigo felt the tears burst from his eyes despite himself. _Please, please, make it stop._

\---

He only tried stealing a real weapon from the dojo master’s office once. It was a short sword with a sharp edge, and it gave Ichigo hope.

It was the first time that he’d had anything to do in and of himself in Masaki’s death. He hadn’t lost time like that since the first days, but having his mom end up skewered across his blade as her usual killer laughed at them. He screamed like a banshee at a morgue, and looked like one too.

\---

Ichigo didn’t understand why she wasn’t defending herself, especially when he wasn’t there when Grand Fisher killed her. He knew she was a Quincy, and everyone knew that that hollow needed to be put down. He’d never seen her bow, but that hardly meant anything aside from that he didn’t know how to ask about it.

He had a thought that maybe she would have something somewhere he could use to learn to make a bow, somehow. He knew most of the theory from Ishida, and maybe this was something he could train himself in.

He never did find any evidence of his mom’s Quincy history or any kind of focus. Maybe that was why she hadn’t, because she didn’t have any anymore.

Ichigo just knew that he wanted her to fight back somehow, and she just wasn’t most of the time.

\---

Urahara looked at him like an adult who didn’t know how to deal with a child the first time he tried ditching his mom to show up at the shop. He gave Ichigo a cookie, listened to his concerns, and set him on his way.

That go around, Ichigo saw a bucket hat arriving just too late to do anything, and, for the third time, felt an all-consuming hate.

\---

There were other attempts at plans and plots. Ichigo threw himself into Grand Fisher’s mouth once, and tried to dominate all of the other hollows in it. He could do it, just not quickly enough. Standing in front of his mother just got him killed too. Bringing his father along wasn’t any more useful. Human weapons, like pepper in the eyes, just weren’t enough of a deterrent.

He’d tried the Vizards’ warehouse once, only to see that they weren’t there. Ishida senior had been difficult to convince, and the outcome of that one was something Ichigo didn’t want to see repeated at any other time.

And Ichigo had gone kind of numb. He didn’t think he was going to be able to save his mom, and by this point he wasn’t entirely sure he cared anymore. He just wanted it to stop. _Please, please._

But time marched onwards in this vicious circle, and Ichigo thought that this might be what going insane looked like. Speaking as the boy who’d grown up with ghosts and voices in his head, that should have been a scarier thought, but he was just so tired.

Of course, that was the first day he saw Aizen.

Aizen didn’t look like the Aizen he knew. He was still wearing a captain’s robe and glasses the sun glinted off of, but Ichigo would recognize the hair and the voice anywhere. A young Aizen, with some interest in Grand Fisher, and possibly the one setting the hollow on his mother. He was strangely driven towards her specifically.

And then he caught sight of a young-looking Gin, and Ichigo hatched one more plan.

\---

By now, he had so much experience manipulating this day that it almost felt like child’s play. Urahara was the best to deploy about Aizen, and he could keep Ishida Senior in mind as a backup plan but between his ability to force the confrontation to happen where he wanted it, he didn’t think he’d even need that.

Urahara mostly disabled Aizen, and Gin finished the job he’d trained for, leaving Urahara to take Gin in, since he’d just killed a Captain of the Gotei 13, a well-liked one even if that was because Aizen hid his true nature rather well.

Ichigo left them in a good place to see Grand Fisher and some knowledge about what Ichigo already knew it could do, because Aizen always was one to monologue. He put himself between his mom and the final blow anyway, since he was sure he could do it between his blut vene, which he had been able to work on, and the bits of hollow regeneration he could scrape from Shiro if necessary.

And it wasn’t, because Ichimaru Gin wasn’t beholden to Aizen anymore and went to kill the thing himself. Ichigo never thought he’d be thanking Ichimaru, but strange times made for stranger bedfellows.

And, somehow, Ichigo went to sleep that night, with his mom safely in bed with his dad. He ended up sleeping with them so he knew that they were safe.

And then he woke up the next morning in his own bed, not entirely sure he’d been successful. What if it had reset anyway? What if it was all meaningless?

His mom came in, kissed him on the head, and told him she loved him. All he could remember was all the times she’d died. He pulled her arms around her belly, cherishing the quiet moment before he was going to have to go and face the consequences of his actions.

There was a hollow roar in the distance, but not Grand Fisher. That one Ichigo could pick out without any supernatural sense by the rise of hairs on the back of his neck.

\---

Ichigo dies, aged fifteen for only the second time, aged thirty two, high school student turned substitute shinigami and pint sized cloud of violence and protectiveness and big brother besides. Ichigo dies, trying to keep Rukia alive, because someone had to and it obviously wasn’t going to be _her_ family. Besides, he owed her his. He owed her this. So he dies for her, and thinks it’s okay because no one will have to know, not even himself.

Ichigo dies, and he wakes up. There’s a hollow roar in the distance he was never expecting to hear again. He promised himself not to cry for his mom anymore, but this time he was crying for himself.

**Author's Note:**

> Oh wowee, this sort of gripped me by the ears and said _finish me_ instead of dying the quiet death of a getting-back-into-writing-after-a-couple-weeks exercise it was meant to be. Had fun writing it though, hope you enjoy it!


End file.
